10/12/2009 @ 12:00AM

The Education Revolution

If you believe the nightmarish forecasts, the American labor market will take a decade to return to full employment. That means that kids in high school and middle school are going to walk directly into an economic buzz-saw by the time they graduate, and that’s assuming, rather wishfully, that all of them will indeed graduate. Roughly half of these children are college-bound, which means that they will have the time and resources to gain some valuable and not-so-valuable skills.

But as recent college graduates are discovering to their dismay, that is no guarantee that they will find remunerative work. Worse still, the effects of unemployment tend to linger. Even after the economy picks up, entering the workforce during a recession means that your wages will always be lower than those who enter during a boom. Though youth unemployment hasn’t reached the crisis levels we see in Europe, where it has fueled political protest and rising anxiety about crime and violence, that is the direction in which we’re clearly heading.

For an even scarier thought, it’s possible that those models that predict the labor market eventually returning to normal are neglecting the possibility that we’re seeing a deeper, more structural shift. It could be that the next labor market will devalue precisely the skills that today’s schools are most keen to impart–rote memorization, the ability to sit still, the ability to perform calculations best performed by $5 calculators. Given that we have so much advance warning, shouldn’t our schools be preparing students for this tough new environment? We can’t plead ignorance, as the wrenching economic changes we’re about to go through are, as Princeton economist Alan Blinder has argued, eminently predictable.

When Blinder first started writing about offshoring in 2006, he called it “the next industrial revolution,” potentially as consequential as the 20th-century shift from manufacturing to services. The number of tradable goods and services has expanded dramatically thanks to advances in communications technology, and Blinder is convinced that this trend will accelerate in the years to come. Just as U.S.-based manufacturers face intense competition from scrappy Asian industrialists, providers of impersonal services, which Blinder describes as “services that can be delivered electronically over long distances with little or no degradation in quality,” will soon find themselves at risk of becoming obsolete.

In a paper published earlier this year, Blinder and his Princeton colleague Alan Krueger estimated that 25% of U.S. jobs are potentially offshorable. My sense is that this number is actually an underestimate. In Blinder’s view, college teaching is a paradigmatic example of a profession in which long-distance provision leads to a degradation in quality. And yet we’ve seen a number of long-distance educational services prove highly competitive in recent years–so competitive that incumbent providers are doing everything they can to create barriers to entry.

The September issue of The Washington Monthly features Kevin Carey’s wonderful article on StraighterLine, a firm that offers students as many college courses as they want for $99 a month, far below the thousands of dollars charged by rival services. Like more expensive services, the education offered by StraighterLine is tailored to the individual student; you can move as quickly or slowly through the material as you’d like. Tutors based in India and the Philippines provide more of a personal touch than any overburdened graduate student.

Blinder, who served on Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors and as a vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, has rightly identified offshoring as a compelling reason to transform our educational system. He has challenged the shibboleth that increasing access to college is sufficient to meeting the economic needs of our workforce, emphasizing instead the need to prepare students for work in personal services that are far less likely to be offshored. To that end, he wants schools to emphasize so-called “soft skills,” like the ability to work well in teams, as well as creativity and problem-solving ability. He wants less standardization and more spontaneity, and I strongly concur.

But is this possible in our industrial school system? I doubt it. My fear is that we’ll instead encourage students to pursue college degrees and then post-graduate degrees as a way of fattening up the education-industrial complex. Just as mass incarceration masks unemployment in the United States, mass higher-education increasingly masks unemployment in Germany and South Korea: Students take years to complete useless degrees, and once they’re out, they find themselves loaded up with debt. This will work wonders for administrators but not for students. If we really want to encourage change, we need to look to educational entrepreneurs.

In Sweden, the educational landscape has been transformed by the advent of a sweeping choice program that allows anyone–groups of parents, civil society groups, and, most important, for-profit enterprises–to establish their own schools that would then receive per-pupil funding at roughly the same rate as state-run schools. If this sounds like the familiar idea of universal school vouchers, championed by American libertarians and conservatives, you’re on the right track.

But it turns out that the solidarity-minded Scandinavians have gone far further in this direction than any American jurisdiction. The results have been a stunning success, one that has delighted students and parents alike. As Anders Hultin, one of the creators of Sweden’s system of “free schools,” has argued, the profit motive has encouraged successful schools to clone themselves, not unlike a fast-food franchise. One can easily imagine such schools touting their success in placing graduates in good jobs. The beauty of this approach is that it doesn’t demand that school administrators in some central office divine the one best way to encourage spontaneity; rather, it allows hundreds, if not thousands, of free-thinkers to experiment.

Were I to design my own free school, I would follow Blinder in focusing on the value of teamwork. Among other things, I would require students to hold after-school jobs and apprenticeships to instill a sense of responsibility. Ideally, I’d encourage–indeed, I might even require–all high school graduates to take a gap year before starting college. This would give students a chance to work grueling jobs before returning to the warm embrace of their peers, in the process giving them a real sense of appreciation.

Reihan Salam is a fellow at the New America Foundation. The co-author of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, he writes a weekly column for Forbes.